Online dating and social relationship services have become a popular way for individuals to meet and to begin relationships whether for friendship, romance, or the pursuit of shared interests. As Internet-based technology has evolved, so have the online dating services and social relationship services. What began as chat rooms and sometimes even as telephone-based services have evolved into more sophisticated services offering photographs, videos, highly detailed profiles and predictive compatibility tests all intended to allow a user to be matched more precisely with a set of potential new aquaintances or dates.
Unfortunately, the fault with these highly detailed profiles and with the search functions and predictive compatibility tests built upon them is contained in a simple truth: what people say they wish to do is not exactly what they will actually do and that the things that people say they want are not necessarily the things that these same people actually want.
On one particular dating site, www.plentyoffish.com, a complex variability has been observed between the desired characteristics of a potential match that a user will describe in completing a user survey and in the characteristics that exist within the profiles that the user actually chooses to view or select for further contact.
For example, in filling out a user survey, the user may indicate a preference for non-smokers, but in selecting profiles to view and users to contact, may not pay much attention to the attribute of smoking.
Conversely, a user may indicate in the user survey a preference for matches who are taller than 5′10″ and then adhere to that criteria when selecting user profiles.
One facet of the problem in providing an optimal selection of user profiles based upon survey responses is that not all questions on an online dating or social relationship survey are meaningful or important to each user. Even if the survey would allow a user to specify an importance for each attribute, the user's estimation could still be in error. The observed activity of the user in relation to candidate user profiles, recorded over time, is a better measure of their actual preferences and predictor of their future preferences.
There exists then, a need for an online dating service or social relationship service where the selection of potential matches to be displayed to a particular user is adaptive to the actual interests and desires of that user based upon his or her actual viewing and contact history in addition to the interest and desire information originally reported and maintained in the user's profile.